The Last Days of Video (4 page)

But Young Joe Don Baker wasn't interested. Nor, Waring imagined, was anyone else.

Four hours later, after five pints and two whiskeys and an entire pack of cigarettes, and after abandoning a crossword puzzle upon seeing evidence, in that same crossword, of the progressive degradation of his own handwriting, Waring started walking home. Very drunk.

Time was slippery and amorphous, like the sidewalk under his feet.

Then he was lying on the street. Which was strange, he decided. Where was he lying? How had lying occurred? He had been walking home. Yes, he had made it to his own driveway.

He heard a familiar skishing sound.

Finally he managed to look up. Gliding in a circle of which Waring was the focal point were three muscular men on bicycles.

They all wore tight, ball-toting shorts.

They skidded to a halt.

Waring squinted at them, pulled them into focus. Below the unzipped collars of their body-hugging shirts was a large insignia that read: “Blockbuster.”

One of the men was Adam Prick.

“What the fuck do you want, you dickless wonder?” Waring spat.

Another of the men, a tall rangy guy with dark skin and black hair, said, “Waring Wax, your day of reckoning is approaching.”

A NIGHTMARE ON WARING'S STREET

Jeff sat in the
Appleton Starbucks nursing a third cup of coffee, trying (failing) to focus on his
Introduction to Business Administration
textbook, and trying (failing) to ignore the pretty coed sitting by the front window. He chugged coffee because it was the college thing to do. But now his arms and face trembled, and his stomach gnawed at its own wooden insides. He understood now that three cups was way too much. And the girl made it worse somehow. She was stunning—a runner's body, tanned skin, glossy blue soccer jersey with three white stripes down each sleeve. She stared at her laptop, entranced, nibbling her lower lip.

Concentrate
, Jeff told himself—in his textbook a lengthy sentence lay broken and jumbled, despite five attempts to comprehend it.

After failing to concentrate for the sixth and seventh time, Jeff glanced again at the runner/soccer player/genius and saw, much to his surprise, that she was now looking in his direction.

He turned, studied the wall behind him. Hanging there was a huge, creepy lithograph of a horse. Obviously she was looking at that.

He shut the textbook. Agitated sigh. Almost midnight. The café would close soon. He had watched the girl for two hours in the
hopes that . . . what was he hoping? That she would approach
him?
That on one of his many trips to the bathroom a pen might slip from her table and he might valiantly retrieve it? That if any other such bizarre twist of fate were to draw them into conversation, he wouldn't make a total fool of himself?

He pushed the textbook into his backpack, stood, and, emboldened more by caffeine than by anything resembling confidence, he approached her table. She looked up from her computer. Her thoughtful frown vanished. She smiled.

Smiling back as casually as possible, Jeff said, “Hello?”

“Hi!” she responded brightly, and she produced a sweet little laugh.

But the laugh was so little and so sweet that it demolished whatever Jeff had planned to say next.

Long, painful silence.

Then the cell phone on her table rang—some recent Beyoncé tune—probably one of her nine million friends.

“I just wanted to say hello,” he pronounced over the noise of the phone.

“Sorry, it's my mother,” the girl said. “I should probably answer.”

“Cool, I talk to my mother all the time.” He chuckled at nothing, hoping to obscure the absurdity of this comment, then repeated: “I just wanted to say hello.”

“Okay?” she said, her expression now straining at its edges.

And without thinking, Jeff's gaze rose to the door. He lifted his hand in a brief wave of farewell, and he exited the café still wearing, he now realized, the same deranged smile he'd been wearing all along.

Jeff walked quickly across
College Street and onto Appleton University's campus. There he passed darkened class buildings—some gothic and corniced, others new and glass-fronted—and he trudged up to the one-hundred-year-old clock tower that crowned the
university, where he'd made a habit of loitering moodily over the past few nights. The clock tower, along with the craggy live oaks surrounding it, was the postcard image that had helped sell him, and many other freshmen, on Appleton University. But tonight, the postcard had lost its romantic luster. It was just a redbrick monolith displaying the painfully slow passage of time. Standing there, looking up at the thing, Jeff didn't feel at all like loitering moodily, hoping someone would talk to him, and scribbling nonsense in his journal like the stupid undergrad he was.

So he considered walking the quarter mile to his dorm. But he was too jacked on coffee to sleep. And his roommate, who was a basketball player, had made no secret of his preference to be left alone with whatever new girl he'd probably be bringing back to their room.

Almost without thinking, Jeff moved west, off campus and back onto College Street. There the sidewalks swarmed with smilers and drinkers, all of them attractive, all of them friends with one another, all the young women showing off their flawless legs and end-of-summer tans, all the young men wearing expensive shirts and yapping on cell phones and screaming guttural insults at each other like steroidal jocks. Jeff tried to avoid their gazes, and he crossed the street to elude bars brimming with laughing women.

And all the while he muttered to himself, chastised himself for his infinite rottenness—his failure so far to make
any
college friends, his struggles to keep up in his freshmen classes, how for no good reason he'd skipped church last Sunday (tomorrow, he
had
to go to Tanglewood Baptist tomorrow), how he was just a country bumpkin in this big bustling town, a lamb amidst the wolves, a fool in the king's court.

And most of all he reprimanded himself for his humiliation with the café girl. Stupid virgin. Catching his reflection as he passed the darkened shop windows of College Street, seeing his pitiful, zitty face . . . and somehow
not
seeing that his trim frame and muscular
shoulders might be attractive to many of the females who terrified him . . . Jeff knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the person looking back at him was a total virgin loser.

He'd lived in his musty dorm at Appleton University for thirteen days, and his life now mirrored every corny college movie he'd ever watched—
Van Wilder, Real Genius, Old School
, and his favorite,
PCU
, which he believed was an underrated classic—but his life lacked any of the exciting, redeeming plot elements of that genre: parties, laughter, topless girls, loveable sidekicks, incremental triumph. Part of him had truly believed that because he was so well versed in College Freshman Plotlines, he'd also be immune to social awkwardness, homesickness, fear of maniacal professors. But he wasn't immune. Not at all. Occasionally his newfound freedom enthralled him (Momma never would have allowed him to walk aimlessly until one a.m.), but mostly it was weirdly repressive. The sheer number of choices. The glut of opportunities. Thousands of people who already seemed to know each other, and Jeff—exactly as in high school—too tongue-tied to make friends.

He had thought college would be different. And it was different. It was worse.

He clenched his fists and belted out a high-pitched, Bruce Lee squeal, and he kicked a pinecone with kung fu rage, sending it chattering across the pavement in the grubby West Appleton neighborhood where he now found himself.

So many clichés, he thought. Why couldn't he just relax? Be a normal person? Was he incapable of happiness? Only his job at Star Video was going well. Thank God he had found the place. Thank God Alaura had hired him. He needed the money, even if Star Video only paid minimum wage. But all those movies! He had already used his free rentals to watch ten films he never would have had access to back home in Murphy, North Carolina, the crappy mountain town where he'd spent his entire pointless life. His Star Video
coworkers were cool, if a bit strange. Alaura was amazing, of course. And Waring . . . well, what could you say about Waring? Waring was bonkers. He was mean to Jeff. He complained constantly. He insulted customers. He was always drunk, or at least smelled like it. And he seemed completely disinterested in the welfare of his own company—Jeff had hoped to learn how to run a successful small business, but instead he had learned that some businesses survive
despite
their owners. Nothing about Waring made any sense.

But still, something about the short, strange, cranky drunk was . . . interesting. Waring seemed to know everything about movies. If a customer mentioned some random director, most of whom Jeff had never heard of, Waring could list all of that director's notable movies,
Rain Man
–style, all while still making rude quips to whomever he was condescending, and all while not removing his gaze from whatever movie he was watching, whatever book he was reading. Waring was brilliant and ridiculous in equal measure, and even though customers understandably disliked him, they always, without fail, left with the movie they wanted.

And Alaura liked Waring. That had to mean something.

Then Jeff saw Waring. Twenty yards ahead. Lying on the pavement. As if Jeff had conjured his boss just by thinking about him.

Waring rocked back and forth on his back like an upturned turtle. Yelling incoherent phrases.

Three handsome men on bicycles, laughing.

Seconds later: Jeff stood
between Waring and the cyclists, who were parked side by side, ten feet away, like robber cowboys from some old Western. Jeff did not remember deciding to intervene. Or running toward them. Or even how he had arrived on this street in the first place. But here he was, breathing quickly, shoulders painfully tense—Bruce Lee somersaulting in to save the damsel in distress.

Jeff thought again of the café girl. Of her perfect skin.

“What's going on?” Jeff said to the men—his voice shaking, very un-Bruce-Lee-like.

“Who's there?” Waring hissed, staring blindly at the solitary streetlight directly overhead. “What do you mean, day of reckoning?”

“No. It's Jeff from Star Video.”

“Jeff who?”

“You just hired me.”

“I just what?”

A cyclist interjected: “Don't bother, kid. He's dead drunk.”

It was Adam Pritt, the angry customer, Jeff could now see, from last night.

“What's going on?” Jeff said to him.

“Nothing, kid.”

“Don't call me kid. I'm not your kid.”

“Hey, relax.”

“Don't tell me to relax,” Jeff said, his voice unsteady. “What's going on?”

“What's your name?” said another of them. This man was impossibly handsome, with dark hair and a chiseled jaw. He leaned casually on his handlebars, sweat beaded his forehead, and he took a drink from a glistening water bottle.

“Not saying my name,” Jeff managed.

“Fair enough. But why do you care what happens to this . . . guy?”

“He's . . . he's my boss.”

“Wait, you really work at Star Video?”

“Yes.”

The man emitted a long descending whistle, as if the concept of employment at Star Video was the tallest tale he'd ever heard.

“Listen, kid. We found him like this. Honestly, he was on the ground when we rolled up.”

“I don't believe you.”

“No? Do you really think this is the first time Mr. Wax has ended up drunk on the street?”

To this, Jeff could not summon an intelligent counter.

But he stood his ground, tried to stare down the cyclists. Wealthy men. College-educated men. Perfect complexions. The muscles on their arms and legs linked together like intricate machinery. They were preened and polished, light-years away from the good old boys Jeff had grown up with. Streetlight glinted off the gears of their expensive, space-aged bicycles. Precision equipment. And for some reason, this all called to mind Jeff's small, dingy, piece-of-crap television back home in Murphy. The eight-inch screen. How for years he had stayed up past his bedtime, set the TV on his bed, covered it and himself with a sheet like a kid reading a book, and secretly watched any movie he could find. Good movies or bad movies,
Star Wars
or
Starship Troopers 2
, he didn't care. The warmth from the cathode ray tube had comforted him, helped him forget about his rotten life, about his father, who was a drunk living in some holler and whom Jeff had only met five or six times, and about his mother, who was always right in the next room, and who never left the house and hadn't had a job in years, morbidly obese and fuelling her broad hatreds with Fox News and whatever pills for whatever condition she was suffering from that week.

Movies were his refuge, his escape, his closest friends, his only friends.

“Waring's my friend!” Jeff snapped suddenly.